On Being Retired

 Being retired in East TN without debt...   

While my advice is often ignored because I am not an expert at anything, my advice is to eliminate all debt before you retire...  it just makes bumps in the road easier to walk over.

If my wife and I want to LIVE LARGE, then we can expect to pay $5,000/month for that privilege...   If my wife and I want to LIVE BETTER THAN OK, then we can expect to pay $4,000/month for that privilege...   If we want to LIVE WITHIN OUR MEANS, then we can expect to pay $3,000/month for that privilege.  So, we live in the middle...

Living in the middle requires us to remove $1,000/month from our savings...  or $12,000/year...  or $120,000/decade...   and, if we plan to live two more decades then we need $240,000 saved.  If those years increase to 3 decades, the the amount would be $360,000...

If our mortgage free house is worth $300,000 then we really only need about $100,000 in our savings accounts...

Our East TN home is in a very quiet community and we have an acre of land and a riding lawn mower.  Our house is about 1,500 square feet with another $1,500 square foot full basement that is divided into thirds with a living area, storage, and garage.  Our house is really bigger than we need.

In the back yard, we have a 26 foot round above ground pool, a hot spring hot tub, and a 12 foot pentagon shaped gazebo, all of which is surrounded by a deck.  We have a front porch, a screen-in back porch, 4 bedrooms, 3 full baths, an open kitching, dining, and living room, and adequate storage space.  Under the back porch is another closed in storage area.

Our neighborhood is crime free but we still lock our doors.  We walk around the community for exercise but not after the sun goes down.  In the warm months we spend most of our time ourside.

The first 5 years of our retirement, we traveled somewhere every other month for a week, but after 60 month we decided we had enough traveling.  So we just go to MB,SC twice and stay at home the rest of the time.  We eat out twice a week, a nd do pretty much whatever we want to do without any fears of running out of money.

We have cell phones but no land line.  We have WIFI fiber to the Internet and subscribe to Hulu, Netflix, and Prime through our ROKU device.  Cable sucked and we don't plan to go back.

Politics bothers us both but we are too old to give a shit anymore other than piss and moan to each other about it.  Inflation has not really bothered us as just getting older.

We both stay busy everyday and never get bored wishing we had something to do...

What's best of all about being retired is that you kiss nobody's ass anymore...